For these reasons and more, Marco suggested that there’s little that Apple, or anyone else, could do to substantially improve the TV experience, with the exception of better menu design.

I think there’s a way that Apple (or someone) could integrate modern technology into a TV that would be actually compelling, though. And in some ways it’s the same way that I earlier blogged about for MP3 players. Cross-device user-interfaces. Here’s how it might work for a television:

Imagine a shiny Apple-branded TV. It’s got a power cord, an Ethernet jack, and audio out jacks, full stop. The TV has a built-in Wi-Fi hub (AirPort), so you don’t need another one.

It doesn’t have a dedicated remote control, but instead it uses your iPhone or iPod Touch or iPad. (Read all this as “Google TV” and “Android phone”, if you prefer.) And it’s the best remote control you’ve ever seen. Wi-fi fast and no need to point it at your screen. It has natural, context-dependent, easy-to-use controls, making use of multitouch and other gestures. A TV can have an amazing touch interface if you’re holding one of the screens!

And content will be almost magically flexible. Got a movie on your iPhone you were watching on the subway? It streams wirelessly to your TV when you get home. Watching a movie on TV but have to move to the other room? Now it’s streaming to your tablet. Watching something with multiple views, like sports? Picture-in-picture is so ’90s, it’s two screens now. In fact, you can easily switch any content from one screen to another, or use one device for audio and one for video of the same content.

Your TV doesn’t feel like a separate appliance anymore, it’s an extension of your handheld device, with both connected to the cloud. Apps can make use of both screens (and both CPUs), separating controls from content, or primary from secondary displays in games, or any number of other things.

Imagine how much simpler and less frustrating this experience could be! Somebody make this happen!

A related way to get meat has become fairly popular recently — the meat CSA or meat share. As the NYC Meatshare group describes it, “Looking for healthy meat raised on pasture by small local farms? It’s expensive, but by banding together to buy whole animals we can support farmers and save money.” Members of a meatshare all pitch in to buy a whole animal, which is then butchered and split among the members. Here’s how a meatshare event described the 10th of a hog each member got: “Each person will get an equal amount of bacon and sausage (about 2 lbs each), chops (center & butt), and will divide the other cuts up as equally as possible (including ham steak, loin, organs, etc.)  If you have preferences please let me know, I will do my best to accommodate.  Or, you can swap with other members at my place.”

These two business models put a substantial burden on either the farmer (in the first case) or the consumer (in the second case). The retail model requires the farmer, or a collective of farmers, to put together a retail-ordering web site, a butchery and inventory system, and a delivery and distribution system. The meat share model takes these burdens off the farmers, but requires the consumers to set up and organize the purchase and payment system, meet at a common location, and either take what is available or perform ad hoc swaps. In a more traditional producer-consumer relationship, the supply chain, payment, inventory, and preferences-matching process is taken care of by the comodification of the animals (all cows are the same) and the services provided by a retail grocery store.

One could argue that that’s the third option — Whole Foods — but it sorta defeats the purpose of non-commidified, high-quality meat, and it tends to defeat the pocketbook too. No connection with the farm, just a promise of ethical standards (probably including the pointless “organic” label), and a substantial cut by middlemen. Not really an option at all.

So what else could be done to build sustainable relationships between animal producers and people who value high-quality, ethically produced meat? Why not leverage technology? And not just selling via web sites, but the kind of logistics technology that allows Whole Foods (and UPS, and Walmart) to efficiently get huge varieties of goods from place to place? A group at a recent food-tech hack-a-thon had the start of this idea. They put together a quick demo of a front-end web site (“groupme.at” — clever!) that would allow consumers to choose smaller sets of cuts in such a way that the whole neatly ends up with a whole animal. By setting up a platform that can be easily connected with many small producers all over the country, the problem of every producer needing to be a webmaster is eliminated. And the system to get all of the pieces to add up to whole animals reduces risk for the farmer. It’s a great start. But by leveraging additional open-source tools and some ingenuity, I think it should be possible to do even more.

Imagine a similar web site, but instead of selecting a pre-selected package of cuts, you instead indicate your preferences and price range. As animals become available, you get an emailed notification of a delivery with a set of products that are very similar to the preferences you specified. You might love pork belly and boneless loin. Your neighbor might love cured pork belly (bacon) and chops. You might hate liver, but you’d accept some pig ears every once in a while for your dog. And your neighbor might really like the fatback to render for lard, while you’d find that useless. Everyone who might be sharing in an animal indicates their preferences, and the web site would automatically give everyone as much as possible of what they like the most. Equally important, all of the parts add up to whole animals, so the farmer is not stuck with the risk of unsold inventory.

Now imagine that after a few months, you’ve ranked the cuts of meat from Alice’s Farm 5 stars, but the ones from Bob’s Ranch only 3 stars. And you’ve told the system that you’re willing to pay more to get more of what you really want, but you neighbor tells the web site that he’s willing to make trade-offs to spend less money. You’ve essentially added other constraints, that if balanced well, will make everyone as happy as possible. Also, notice that I mentioned both boneless loin and pork chops? They’re more-or-less the same part of the animal cut different ways, so you can’t sell them both off the same half of the same animal. Now you have exclusive constraints to add into the mix. Maybe everyone’s better off if you get the boneless loin, or maybe everyone’s better off if your neighbor gets the chops. It’s easy to imagine collecting all of this information, but how do you combine it all and optimize the outcome in a utilitarian way?

Why, operations research and computational optimization! Write some software that plugs everyone’s constraints into a set of equations, push a button, let the computer think for a second or two, and wham, you get a solution that balances the constraints as fairly as possible! Send the cut list to the slaughterhouse and email the product lists and bills to the customers, and you’re basically done.

In the past, this sort of supply-chain optimization required massive computing power and complex software design. But now, there are open-source code bases for solving this sort of problem, at least at the scale needed to balance the preferences of a few farmers and a few dozen or hundred customers at a time.

This is the next step in leveraging technology to make at least some aspects of the supply chain for small-scale meat operations as efficient as what Purdue does, but maintaining the high quality and personal connection to the farm that many people want now. All that’s needed are some enterprising hackers to write the code and set up a scalable, configurable web platform for preference-based meatshares.

In my next post, I’ll demonstrate how to write code that uses one of those open-source optimization libraries to solve a small version of this problem. If you’re interested in reading R code, stay tuned!

First of all, you want to be able to make or answer calls from the gadget that’s playing your music. It’ll automatically turn off your music when the phone rings, and you can hear the caller through your headphones. This works fine in current smartphones. Good sound quality, and you can use your own headphones. But you still need a cord between your headphones and your phone. And that cord gets caught in things, and it gets in the way when you want to actually use your phone. Clunky.

Solution: Bluetooth. There are two current ways to use bluetooth gadgets with a smartphone. First of all, you can get a stereo bluetooth headset. Here’s one that looks like the common one-ear bluetooth headsets for phone use, plus a short cord to a separate earphone for your other ear. There are a variety of options, but they all have the same basic idea. Integrated earphones with microphone, and an A2DP connection between your phone and the gadget. A2DP streams medium-quality stereo sound in real-time in one direction, plus you can do simple things like tell your phone to pick up a call and stop the music by pushing a button on your headset. Sounds great, but there are problems. You have to use the earphones provided, which means your studio-quality Shure or noise-cancelling Bose headphones are useless. Second, the audio quality of A2DP is not that great.

A half-solution is a stereo bluetooth gadget that hangs from your neck or clips on your shirt, with a jack so you can use your own headphones. I have one of these, and it sorta works. You can push a button to answer the phone, and it plays the music. But with the better earphones, it’s easy to hear the compression issues with A2DP, and there’s not much ability to control the music without digging my phone out of my pocket. I mostly use it as a bluetooth telephone headset, and rarely to listen to music. Plus, the processing needed to decode and recode the audio is significant, so my phone is not very useful for much else when it’s streaming sound. So the product fails at its intended use.

Instead, I use a dedicated MP3 player. I’ve got a Cowon iAudio 7, and in many ways it’s great. Amazing sound quality, plays OGG files, FM radio, very nice OLED screen. But it doesn’t talk to my phone. Why not?

Here’s what I want. I want my MP3 player and my phone to be two separate interfaces to the same audio sources. The MP3 files should live on my phone, synced to the cloud or my computer, and of course the phone should pull down Internet content. But my phone should push still-compressed versions of the audio content up to my MP3 player, which can take responsibility for decoding it and sending out to my earphones. I want a small eInk or OLED screen, a microphone, and a few simple buttons on the MP3 player — just enough to change the volume, skip to the next track, and see what’s playing. But I want the rest of the controls (plus duplicates of the ones on the MP3 player) to live on my phone, with a big gorgeous color screen, and lots of room for menus, fancy controls, and all the rest. If I play video on my phone, I want the audio to stream, perfectly-sync’ed, with no loss of quality, to my ears. If the phone rings, I want the ability to use either buttons on the MP3 player, or on my phone, to stop the music and pick up. I want the MP3 player to be a well-integrated accessory to my phone, not an afterthought, and I want each piece in the system (smartphone, MP3 player with microphone, and headphones) to do the things they do the best. As far as I know, the current state-of-the-art is nowhere close to this, but there are no good reasons why not.

Drop me a line when your product that does this is on the market. I’ll buy one.

The first audio round, of my design, was songs with at least some French lyrics. One point for the artist, one point for the country of origin or strongest association of the artist. For the historical record, and for your enjoyment, here it is, with answers hidden below (select the text with the mouse to see it). (The Beastie Boys are just to test the volume.)

And here’s the second audio round of the evening, created by Rachel. Halloween-themed, loosely, with lyrics or titles of a creepy nature!

For the dessert itself, we took these flavors and turned them on their heads. The formerly raw pear circles were now lightly carmelized with sugar and butter. The beet, instead of being roasted, was boiled, pureed, and folded into a chocolate cake batter. The ginger juice was mixed into a buttercream instead of a vinagrette. The texture and visual impact of the poppy seeds was replaced with cocoa nibs. The result was an almost perfectly balanced mixture of fruit and butter flavors, sweet and tart, creamy and crunchy. (If I were to make it again, I’d actually add more pear!) We were very happy with the result:

(recipe outline here)